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Henry Barreto
Henry Barreto

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at henrybarreto.dev

How to use Vim in your favorite code editor/ide

Vim is a highly configurable text editor created by Bram Moolenaar in 1991, basing it over an older text called vi, created by Billy Joy in 1976. The greatest differential of vim is the productive it provides through the uses of shortcuts and commands to do a task, and it achieves using only the keyboard.

Because of this characteristic, the learning curve is a bit steep and require some practices to master. Once mastered, the way you write will change in a level what you may not want to use anything else; this happened to me.

The pure vim, just as text editor, could not be so useful for developers what could need a specific tool to work. Hopefully, the vim has other flavors than the vanilla. Major of the greatest IDE what have support for some type of plugin/extension has one way to use vim inside it.

In this article, I will be your Sommelier and list the best flavors.

Visual Studio Code

Could you improve an ice cream what everybody loves? Yes, you can.

Taste the vanilla: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevim.vim

or

The new flavor: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetliakov.vscode-neovim

Sublime

Taste on: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/ActualVim

Atom

Taste on: https://atom.io/packages/vim-mode-plus

IntelliJ IDEA

This is a cool and fresh flavor, almost everybody likes it, and it may make you just buy it.

Taste on: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/164-ideavim

SpaceEmacs

What is the best flavor, strawberry or chocolate? Chocolate's fans have many good arguments and strawberry too, but if we mix them together and add candies, I guess every fan could consider it, is it not? This is SpaceEmacs, an Emacs distribution what tie Emacs and Vim.

Do you not know what is Emacs, and why is weird to bind it them in the same package? The Wikipedia has a full article just about it called "editor war", I guess it does not need any further explanation.

Taste it on: https://www.spacemacs.org/

SpaceVim

  • "SpaceVim is a distribution of the Vim editor that’s inspired by spacemacs. It manages collections of plugins in layers, which help collecting related packages together to provide features. This approach helps keeping configuration organized and reduces overhead for the user by keeping them from having to think about what packages to install"

Taste here: https://spacevim.org/

This is not all, but some that I think could be an inspiration to you do learn vim and use it on your favorite IDE in your day-life work, however, you need to be cautious, you can become a Vim fan and press "I" every time you write something. Go aware!

Did you like it and want to learn how to use vim? You could use one of this online resources:

Thank you for reading, and I hope it was helpful to you today. Feel free to comment, share where someone can learn more about vim, show other flavors of vim or just say a "hi", I will appreciate.

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